The Therapeutic State | thebereancall.org

TBC Staff - EN

[TBC: We have quoted psychiatrist and academic Thomas Szasz in past issues of the newsletter, in which he had Freud primarily in mind when he declared, “...modern psychotherapy...is not merely a religion that pretends to be a science, it is actually a fake religion that seeks to destroy true religion.” Following are some additional observations.]

Thomas Szasz on the Therapeutic State—Alliance Between Government & Psychiatry

“Although we may not know it, we have, in our day, witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control.”

“When I use the term therapeutic state, I use it ironically, it’s therapeutic for the people who are doing the locking up, who are doing the therapy, it’s not therapeutic for the victims, for the patients.”

“In the therapeutic state, treatment is contingent on, and justified by, the diagnosis of the patient’s illness and the physician’s prescription of the proper remedy for it… Today, the therapeutic state exercises authority and uses force in the name of health.” The Founding Fathers “could not have anticipated…that an alliance between medicine and the state would then threaten personal liberty and responsibility exactly as they had been threatened by an alliance between church and state.”cec

“Formerly, people rushed to embrace totalitarian states. Now they rush to embrace the therapeutic state. When they discover that the therapeutic state is about tyranny, not therapy, it will be too late.”

“Coercion masquerading as medical treatment is the bedrock of political medicine. Long before the Nazies [sic] rose to power, physician-eugenicists advocated killing certain ill or disabled persons as a form of treatment for both patient and society. What transforms coercion into therapy? Physicians diagnosing the subject’s conditon as a ‘disease,’ declaring the intervention they impose on the victim a ‘treatment,’ and legislators and judges ratifying these categorizations as ‘diseases’ and ‘treatments.’”

“Every American recognizes that when the government controls religion, all religion becomes the state. But few Americans are willing to accept that when the government controls health, all health becomes public health and all privacy is lost. The erosion of our liberties is not a mystery. It is largely the result of the frightening alliance between medicine and the state….”

http://www.cchrint.org/about-us/co-founder-dr-thomas-szasz/quotes-on-therapeutic-state/